Ussr, U.s. Reach Accord On Afghanistan

ST. PETERSBURG, USSR — The U.S. and Soviet Union, withdrawing from the last of the major proxy wars spawned by superpower rivalry, agreed Friday to stop supplying weapons to opposing sides in Afghanistan and to support efforts to bring about free elections there.

In a joint declaration, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and new Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin said both countries would end weapons deliveries by January 1992-and will not increase arms shipments in the interim-in order to help bring about a conclusion to the 12-year civil war. The agreement will help ``stop the bloodshed in Afghanistan and lead to a peace settlement,`` Pankin said.

The accord marks the end of an era in which Washington and Moscow engaged in Third World conflicts in places such as Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua in a global test of power and influence.

The announcement came on the final day of Baker`s visit to Moscow, during which he found Soviet officials eager to clear away relics of Cold War tension.

Just two days earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev promised Baker that he would withdraw thousands of Soviet troops from Cuba whose presence had long been a major point of dispute in American-Soviet relations.

In another signs of these changes, Baker made an unprecedented visit Friday to the headquarters of the KGB, whose new chief, named in the wake of the failed August coup, used the occasion to urge both countries to scale back espionage operations directed at one another.

``I think on a mutual basis, we will do that,`` Vadim Bakatin said in his fifth-floor office, in a building across the street from the KGB`s notorious Lubyanka prison where in the past thousands of the Kremlin`s opponents were detained and tortured.

``In the KGB, there is a principal question: who is our adversary? And now the KGB has lost that adversary,`` Bakatin said. ``So we have to work a lot in order to acquire a new image.``

Baker said, ``I don`t think anything could symbolize the changes going on in the Soviet Union today any better than the fact that the secretary of state is meeting with the KGB in KGB headquarters.``

In their talks, Bakatin expressed an interest in establishing direct contacts with the CIA to help him reorganize his own intelligence agency, according to U.S. officials.

He also expressed interest in learning about American laws which restrict the government`s power to wiretap its citizens, the officials said.

Later, Baker flew to this Russian city, which has just reclaimed its former pre-revolutionary name, for dinner with reform Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

In their joint statement on Afghanistan, Baker and Pankin said that both countries recognized the need to halt the fighting between the Soviet-backed government and the U.S.-supported Muslim resistance in order to bring about free elections. They called for both sides in the conflict to launch talks, supported by the United Nations, to establish an impartial system to conduct these elections.

They also called on other nations to stop sending weapons to Afghanistan`s government and the Muslim guerillas known as the Mujahedeen.

The U.S. and its allies in the region-Pakistan and Saudi Arabia-began covertly funding the Afghan resistance after the 1979 invasion by Soviet troops in support of a Soviet coup led by Najib. Moscow withdrew its troops a decade later after an inconclusive war in which thousands of Soviet soldiers were killed or wounded. The U.S. pumped more than $2 billion to support the resistance, providing weapons.

The Soviet Union had justified its invasion as necessary to quell Muslim fundamentalism just across its borders. But the U.S. saw the move as an example of Soviet expansionism.

In Kabul, intellectuals and ruling party leaders hailed the U.S.-Soviet agreement, but analysts said it was still not clear how effective the accord would be in ending the war.

The analysts noted that the accord does not sever weapons shipments from third-party nations, and that the proceeds of Afghanistan`s huge opium supply could finance contnued munitions purchases on the open market.

``This will be a positive step if it`s followed up by a concrete plan. If it`s just negative symmetry with nothing behind it, it won`t mean much,`` said Azim Nasser Zia, a leader of the moderate rebel National Islamic Front of Afghanistan.